The Assessment (NATO)
The Assessment is a classified NATO cosmic-top-secret intelligence study prepared at SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) in the early 1960s, documenting that NATO military leadership was aware of ongoing extraterrestrial activity on Earth and that four distinct species of visiting beings had been identified. The document's existence was first publicly disclosed by Bob Dean, a retired United States Army command sergeant major who held a cosmic-top-secret clearance during his SHAPE posting in the mid-1960s and had unrestricted access to the report.
Contents
Dean described the study as a comprehensive survey of the UFO phenomenon, compiled from intelligence contributed by all NATO member nations after a series of incidents in which craft of unknown origin had overflown both NATO and Warsaw Pact military installations. The Assessment concluded that four distinct non-human species were regularly visiting Earth: a tall, Nordic-appearing humanoid physically indistinguishable from humans; the Grey type, a short, large-craniumed species widely reported in close encounter and abduction accounts; a reptilian or reptiloid species; and a fourth group of large-framed insectoid beings. One of the species was biologically indistinguishable from modern Europeans — a finding described by Dean as among the most alarming in the study, as it meant that senior military officials could not be certain whether the person next to them in a meeting was human. Dean further reported that the study's conclusions ran contrary to what its NATO reviewers expected: rather than finding the visitors hostile, the Assessment allegedly concluded that the observed craft demonstrated clear technological superiority and that decades of observed behavior showed no pattern of aggression — a conclusion Dean said had since been buried by disinformation and compartmentalization.
Cold War context
The Assessment was prepared in the context of Cold War tensions surrounding unidentified aerial objects over divided Europe. Paola Harris, who obtained access to a version of the document through her collaboration with Dean, described its significance: Soviet forces saw UFOs crossing East Germany and assumed they were American craft; Western forces saw the same objects and assumed they were Soviet — raising the prospect of a misidentification that could trigger World War III. NATO's interest in cataloging the UFO phenomenon was driven in part by the need to distinguish extraterrestrial craft from hostile foreign military assets to prevent accidental nuclear escalation.
France and NATO withdrawal
Michael Salla noted that NATO countries were sharing extraterrestrial intelligence through The Assessment in the early 1960s, and that France's withdrawal from NATO's integrated command structure in 1966–67 under President Charles de Gaulle may have been connected to disputes over this shared intelligence — a factor in the subsequent development of an independent French Secret Space Program.
Circulation
A copy of The Assessment circulated to allied researchers, including Italian exopolitics journalist Paola Harris, who described the document as originating from Dean's SHAPE posting in Brussels. Dean publicly released his military records to establish his credentials and testified extensively at international UFO conferences from the 1990s onward about the document's contents.
Shift from human-looking to Grey-dominated contact
Salla drew a connection between The Assessment's finding about human-appearing ETs and the historical pattern of 1950s contactee accounts: human-looking extraterrestrials "who look like us and can even appear in public and interact with us, as Bob Dean mentioned" were dominant in the 1950s–1960s; by the late 1960s and 1970s the Greys had become the dominant image in UFO discourse, a shift Salla attributed in part to consequences of classified government agreements and in part to a deliberate psychological warfare program.
Rebuttal
In 2005 NATO published a rebuttal by SHAPE historian Dr. Gregory Pedlow concluding that no document matching Dean's description had ever been produced at SHAPE. The document's existence remains unconfirmed by any released NATO record, though Michael Salla and Paola Harris have pointed to what they describe as corroborating testimony from other SHAPE-era personnel and from French intelligence sources as evidence that the document, or something resembling it, did circulate among NATO governments.
See also
References
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